Temporary Low Cost Travel Cafe

[Michel_M]

A new low cost French airline will open routes on 4th April 2008, from the Nimes-Arles Camargue airport, located in the south of France, to Nice in France, Corsica (seasonal services), Greece, Morocco, the Netherlands, Lebanon, Spain, Tunisia and Portugal, with an Axys Airways plane.

This company will be named Eurociel (www.eurociel.net) and we can book flights right now. on the site, you can book and find the general timetable.

[attitudetravel]

Yes, MetalTraveller first mentioned this new low cost airline on October 4th, 2007:

[attitudetravel]

Okay, let's see how things work out.

Historically start-up budget airlines haven't done well in France. Neither flywest (2004-2005) nor Air Turquoise (2005-2006) lasted much longer than a year before being driven out of business.

Significantly, though, both those airlines were trying to set up a domestic network within France - though flywest also operated a route to Ireland towards the end - and this left them having to compete against SNCF's formidable TGVs as well as Air France, not to mention easyJet.

It's always possible that a France-based international LCC might fare better.

Flying low cost internationally out of France, Eurociel's only potential competition apart from charter airlines such as TUI-owned Corsair would be the Air France low cost subsidiary Transavia France.

So if it picks its routes well and flies to underserved destinations for which there is plenty of demand, we might see Eurociel do very well.
_________________
Alan Lansdowne
Editor, attitudetravel.com

[MetalTraveller]

Eurociel is dead, as usual for french LCC.

If you speak some french, here's the story: http://www.tourmag.com/index.php?action=article&numero=24559


Roughly it says that flights should have begun on april 4, for bookings were suspended.... The director of the Nimes Airport says flights had sold an average of only 8 seats (!). The other problem is that the company didn´t have enough money and the regional council (public money) didn´t gave what promised.

Well, that's nothing new, all french LCC have ended the same way

[attitudetravel]

How sad. I thought the whole plan to create low cost flights between the Maghreb and the South of France and offer affordable transit to North Africans and others flying backwards and forwards across the West Mediterranean was a rather good one in principle.

Transavia France has more low cost routes to the Maghreb than any other European low cost carrier at this point (five destinations in Morocco and three destinations in Tunisia) - but all the routes operate out of Paris Orly.

Meanwhile, Jet 4 you does fly to Morocco from the south of France - but only offers one route: from Marseilles to Casablanca. All of Jet 4 you's other routes from Morocco connect to Lyons, Paris Orly, Brussels Charleroi and Milan.

Eurociel would have been a breath of fresh air.

Here's what one of my French contacts had to say: